There are a moments in Darren Aronofsky's film Noah when the audience is forced to question the existence of God. Take away the deity in the famous story of the ark and suddenly Noah's refusal to save anyone outside his family becomes something much more sinister.

The presence or absence of gods – and the grey area of doubt in between – has proved fruitful grounds for the arts, not least in the world of opera.

It's rare to find unambiguously omnipotent gods in opera (Diana's appearance at the end of Gluck's Iphigénie en Taurideis a notable exception) because flawed gods are so much more interesting.

More usually, we meet the gods cut down to human-size – as in Wagner's Ring cycle, where the petty jealousies of the gods lead to the fall of Valhalla and the end of their rule. Baroque opera is peppered with human-size gods – from Handel's Jupiter in Semele to King Plutone in Monteverdi's Orfeo. They make mistakes, fall in love, become angry, feel pain, fall into traps. In Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, not only do we see Bacchus falling in love with Ariadne but the 'godliness' of the gods is undermined in the Prologue. Here we see the singers who will become Ariadne and Bacchus in the opera’s second half worrying about their roles, their wigs and being upstaged by a comedy troupe.

But some opera composers have pushed the concept of a god even further, until the deity's very existence is thrown into doubt. And, as in Aronofsky's Noah, that affects how we judge the characters and their actions.

Strauss deliberately leaves the classical gods out of his opera Elektra, and in his Salome the characters argue about whether the Messiah that Jochanaan (John the Baptist) speaks of even exists. Morality in these works is slippery because neither the characters nor the audience agree on who the higher power is – or even if there is one.

In Les Troyens, Berlioz exploits the same uncertainty, sidelining the gods and so throwing responsibility back onto the warring humans. Writing 150 years later, Birtwistle plays on the same doubts in his opera The Minotaur; he gives the creature the ability to speak and focuses not on the shadowy gods behind it all but on the human toll of the Minotaur's killing, and the creature's own suffering.

Mozart's Idomeneo has traditionally been an example of an opera in which the gods are unusually godlike: Neptune the sea god saves king Idomeneo in the first act – but at a cost – and the god's disembodied voice resolves the plot at the end. But in his new production for The Royal Opera, director Martin Kušej casts doubt on the opera's gods. And we're left with the question: if they aren't steering the story's arc, who is? And what justification is there for the characters' actions if Neptune is a figment of their imagination or – worse – an invention to excuse their actions?

In this age of increased scepticism, the gods of opera are more interesting than ever.

Singer-songwriter and composer Ana Silvera knows all too well the effect a diagnosis of psychosis can have on an individual, as well as their family and friends: her older brother was committed to a psychiatric ward when he was 15.

‘Seeing someone so close to me within the mental health system had a huge impact on me. I think through my work I have been trying to explore that state to put myself in his shoes, creatively, but also to explore how society reacts to someone in that state,’ she explained in the podcast.

Silvera has written the music for Cassandra, a new ballet which has been choreographed by former Royal Ballet First Artist Ludovic Ondiviela and which integrates filmed material by Kate Church into the performance. The production aims to explore perceptions of mental illness and what it means to be ‘mad’.

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Mark Salter has been working with the Cassandra production team. In this podcast, he talks about the role that the arts can play in helping people understand mental health:

‘I would say that art is the best hope we’ve got when it comes to trying to elucidate and clarify the dark, frightening side of the world. Good art is something that takes you to an uncomfortable place and brings you back feeling safer and wiser as a result.’

Ana Silvera is generously supported by PRS for Music Foundation and Women Make Music.

‘Can any of us imagine a musical world without Philip Glass?’ asked Tom Service in The Guardian. Glass’s music – love it or hate it – has had a profound effect not just on the world of classical music but also on pop music, film music and the broader cultural landscape.

Influences

Glass studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, but perhaps his biggest influence was the sitar player Ravi Shankar. Glass became Shankar’s assistant on the soundtrack for the 1966 film Chappaqua. Glass later described how, ‘I saw the possibility of using some of the technical procedures of classical Indian music with Western instruments and making a very different language. It was a way out of the cul-de-sac that Stockhausen and the Serialist composers had created.’

In the 1960s Glass studied Buddhism and it was also around this time that the movement we now know as minimalism was born. After making contact again with Steve Reich – the pair had studied together at the Juilliard School – Glass began to strip his music back to create what he called ‘music with repetitive structures’, such as Strung Out (1967) or Music in 12 Parts (1971–4).

Impact

Glass’s film music has earned him a clutch of awards, so it’s no surprise that he's had a huge influence on other film composers, including Hans Zimmer.

David Bowie is another figure who's absorbed Glass’s music – and this influence has worked both ways. Glass based two of his symphonies (no.1 and no.4) on albums by Bowie (Low and Heroes respectively), whose music in turn has been hugely influenced by Glass's minimalism.

Nico Muhly, one of today’s most successful contemporary composers, studied with Glass. Muhly has said: ‘[Glass] is someone who knows how to control an emotional situation calmly without being hysterical. His score for The Hours is a perfect example of that, where it sets a mood for this very complicated story without insisting on anything. It’s just the right amount of melancholic without being over the top.’

Five works to explore

Einstein on the Beach (1976)
This five-hour opera is scored for synthesizers, woodwinds and voices. The four acts are divided by short scenes called ‘knee plays’ which include the sound of a chorus of voices counting.

Music in 12 PartsWritten for voices, electric organs, flutes and saxophones, this four-hour piece was one of Glass’s first and most important works. The experience of listening to the piece has been described as ‘the aural equivalent of standing at the top of a giant waterfall, mesmerized by the illusion that such a rushing body of water could also appear so stable, so even.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2euBS6YzrK4

Symphony No. 9
While writers have been debating whether the symphony is still relevant for contemporary music, Glass has just got on with writing them – he’s now written ten. His ninth was completed in 2011, and was commissioned by the Bruckner Orchester Linz.

String QuartetsThe composer’s five string quartets span nearly three decades, from 1966 to 1991. Glass has said: ‘In an odd way, string quartets have always functioned as moments of profound introspection about both self and music, for composers. I don’t really know why, but it’s almost impossible to get away from it. It’s the way composers of the past have thought and that’s no less true of me.’

Count Almaviva has arrived in Seville to woo a beautiful woman he glimpsed in Madrid. But, unbeknownst to the Count, Rosina is due to be married to her guardian, Doctor Bartolo, the next day. Can Figaro, the quick-witted town barber, bring about a happy ending?

Second Time Lucky

Gioachinio Rossini’s Il barbiere is the earliest opera to have remained constantly popular on the international stage. But its premiere, in Rome on 20 February 1816, was a disaster. Licking his wounds in a letter to his mother, Rossini said: ‘My opera was solemnly booed’. But by the second night the audience had changed their mind and the composer had to acknowledge their applause five or six times.

A Creature of Society

The first version of what would become Pierre Beaumarchais’s play Le Barbier de Séville was called Le Sacristain and included musical movements. When it was rejected by the musical theatre of Paris in 1772, Beaumarchais rewrote the work as a spoken social comedy. Rossini and his librettist Cesare Sterbini then transformed Beaumarchais’s neighbourhood schemer into a quick-witted facilitator who’s at the heart of the town’s secret affairs.

Il barbiere is peppered with show-stopping arias that let the opera’s performers flex their coloratura muscles. The most famous, is Figaro’s opening aria – the fiendishly fast ‘Largo al factotum’ from Act I scene 1. It follows quick on the heels of the elaborately decorated 'Ecco, ridente in cielo', with which the Count unsuccessfully serenades Rosina's window. No less impressive, though, is her ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Act I scene 2 in which she lets the audience in on a secret or two. One of the highlights of the opera, though, comes in Act II scene 1, when the successfully united couple spend so long singing a love duet, their ladder has gone by the time they try to escape through the window.

Friedrich Nietzsche wasn't the first to see a connection between art and myth, writing about great art as a balancing act between the elegant beauty of Apollo and the raw energy of Dionysus. Whether or not you agree with him, Nietzsche’s choice to talk about the arts in terms of Greek gods is a reflection of how ballet, opera and theatre continually look back to classical mythology. For ballet, it's a fascination that has been there from the start.

The earliest ballets were entertainments that took place in the grand European courts of the 17th century and drew their stories from antiquity. Famously, King Louis XIV of France took part in Ballet de la nuit in 1653 and played the part of the sun god Apollo. It was as a result of this appearance that the ruler gained his nickname ‘the Sun King’.

So when George Balanchine turned to classical mythology for his 1928 ballet, Apollo, the art form already had a long-standing relationship with the inhabitants of Mount Olympus. This one-act ballet depicts the eponymous young god being instructed in the arts by three Muses – Calliope, Polyhymnia and Terpsichore – and it is the work that Balanchine regarded as his artistic coming of age.

Like Apollo, Balanchine’s Orpheus (first performed in 1948), uses a score by Stravinsky. The ballet was part of New York City Ballet’s inaugural performance and is a highly stylized retelling of Orpheus’s fabled attempt to rescue his wife Eurydice from Hades.

But Balanchine wasn’t the only choreographer to be mining this rich vein of inspiration. His near-contemporary Martha Graham turned to the evocative stories of Greek mythology for some of her most powerful works. Night Journey (1947), for example, is Graham’s haunting version of the Oedipus story, as told from the point of view of the hero’s mother (and later wife) Jocasta in the moments before her suicide.

Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Frederick Ashton was inspired by the stories of antiquity, and in 1951 the curtain rose on the premiere of his ballet Daphnis and Chloë to music by Ravel. Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes starred in this bucolic story of two young lovers, whose tribulations are overseen by the god Pan.

The stories of antiquity continue to inspire choreographers. In 2009 Wayne McGregor worked with The Royal Opera to stage a double bill of two myth-inspired works – Handel’s Acis and Galatea and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – in a productions that saw Royal Opera House singers and ballet dancers share the stage in a rare collaboration.

As The Royal Opera prepares for the return of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, former editor of Heatmagazine Julian Linley joins us for a new podcast. He looks back at how Anna Nicole Smith’s dramatic life and untimely death were portrayed in the world of celebrity journalism.

‘Anna Nicole’s was a very visual story,’ he explains, ‘it was the picture of this very glamorous young woman who had a very trashy kind of appeal, getting married to a guy who was really old. The image of the two of them together: that was the story.’

Smith rose to fame in the 1990s when she appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine but really caught the media’s attention when she married the octogenarian oil tycoon, J. Howard Marshall, in 1994. He died just 14 months later and the rest of Smith’s life was dominated by disputes over Marshall’s fortune, bankruptcy and, later, a dispute over the paternity of her daughter. Smith died in 2007, aged 39, as a result of a prescription drug overdose.

So what has changed since Smith’s death?

‘There has definitely been a cultural shift away from celebrity,’ says Linley, ‘I think that there has really been a turning point culturally because of technology – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube – it allows anyone to be a celebrity. But rather than being a celebrity to a big audience, as Anna Nicole Smith was, now you can be a celebrity within your community. It’s turned the cameras very firmly on us all.’

Mozart referred to his third and final collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte as an 'opera buffa', and it's habitually labeled a comedy – there are plenty of laughs to be found amid the confusion, chaos and mistaken identity of this meticulously crafted masterpiece. But at heart, this opera is about two sisters (Dorabella and Fiordiligi) who are tricked into swapping lovers and falling in love with each other's fiancé, which leaves a decidedly bitter aftertaste to the ‘happy-ever-after’ final scene, for all Mozart’s wonderful music. In the libretto the two women swap back to their original partners, but modern directors have found ingenious ways to deal with the tricky ending, sometimes having the women swap partners yet again.

Rossini’s light-hearted comedy Il turco in Italia is as bright and breezy as they come, but this operatic candyfloss is still spiced with some of life's darker elements. Shortly after the start of the opera we meet Zaida, who has had to flee her dashing lover Selim and life she led in a Turkish harem because of death threats from jealous rivals. Then there's the unhappy marriage of Geronio and his much younger, fickle wife Fiorilla, whose eyes seem to rove to every many she meets. Even Rossini's famously labyrinthine plot twists don't quite manage to leave everyone happy: it’s only right at the last minute, and after Fiorilla has lost much of her joie de vivre, that the couples are (at least temporarily!) happily reunited.

Verdi’s larger-than-life drunken knight, taken from Shakespeare’s Henry IV parts I and II and The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a comic delight – he chases after young women, runs up a huge bill at the Garter Inn and is tipped into the Thames from a laundry basket. But, as in Shakespeare’s original, Falstaff is as much an object of ridicule and pity as he is the bringer of laughter. In Verdi’s opera, Act III in particular has a vein of darkness running through it, from Falstaff’s opening aria bemoaning the wickedness of the world (‘Mondo ladro’ – 'Thieving world!') to the scene in Windsor Great Park in which the followers of a fake ‘Queen of the Fairies’ pinch and punch the portly knight before the final fugue concludes 'Tutto nel mondo è burla! ('All the world's a joke!').

This unique opera is the largest work to spring from the iconic partnership of Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. When the opera opens, Fatty the 'attorney', Trinity Moses and Leokadja Begbick are on the run from the authorities for a clutch of crimes. They decide to found a new city dedicated to pleasure, greed and excess. Weill found inspiration in jazz and cabaret music but also - more unexpectedly - in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with its mix of comedy and tragedy, and speech with singing. The opera is bitingly satirical and uses the darkest of black humour to hammer home its critique of the excesses of capitalism. But, as always with Weill and Brecht, they put on a top-class show while making their political point.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s controversial opera, a Royal Opera House commission and revived for the first time in September 2014, takes the story of model, ex-stripper and film star Anna Nicole Smith and charts her meteoric rise (and fall) from single mother and supermarket worker to household name and widow of an octogenarian billionaire. Turnage himself has said ‘three-quarters of the piece is comic’ and throughout the work Richard Thomas’s deeply acerbic libretto mines comedy from the bleakest situations – Smith’s first job in a fried chicken restaurant, her decision to pay for breast enlargement, the arrival on the scene of her husband-to-be in the strip club where Smith works and his sudden death at one of Anna’s wild parties. It’s only in the second half of the opera that the comedy gives way to an ever-growing sense of tragedy.

Così fan tutte runs from 22 September—19 October 2016. Tickets are still available.

In this podcast, Dance Critic and Arts Editor in Chief of The Daily Telegraph, Sarah Crompton, who has seen the Mariinsky Ballet perform many times, talks about the company’s distinctive style and what to look forward to in its Summer Season at the Royal Opera House.

The biblical figure of Moses has inspired works of art down the centuries, not least Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron. But Moses is by no means restricted to the highbrow – he looms large in popular culture, from cartoons to pop songs. Here are some of our favourites.

The Ten Commandments
Probably the most famous portrayal of Moses on film, The Ten Commandments was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and released in 1956. Charlton Heston plays Moses opposite Yul Brynner as Rameses in what became one of the most successful biblical epics ever made. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the film ‘Simultaneously ludicrous and splendid’, but whatever your view, there's no question that DeMille helped define Moses in the popular imagination. The film won an Oscar for its pioneering use of special effects, which include Moses’s staff turning into a viper.

Superman
You don’t have to spend long on the internet to discover an ongoing debate about whether Superman is more Messiah or Moses. But David S. Goyer, screenwriter for 2013's Man of Steel, recently said in an interview: ‘Obviously the idea of Superman’s parents casting him off into the stars is a blatant reference to Moses in the bulrushes. And while Superman’s adoptive earth parents are not pharaohs, Superman is a being from one race raised by members of another race; he has to come to grips with his own heritage, just as Moses did.’

'All You Zombies' by The Hooters
There's been an opera by Rossini (Mosè in Egitto), an oratorio by Max Bruch, even a musical (The Ten Commandments: The Musical, with music by Patrick Leonard and book by Maribeth Derry). But you can also find Moses in the world of pop music. 1980s rock band The Hooters invoked the prophet in their hit-song ‘All You Zombies’: he 'went to get the Ten Commandments – Yeah, he’s just gonna break them in half.’

History of the World: Part IMel Brooks’s 1981 filmflits lightly through human history from the Stone Age to the French Revolution stopping off at the Roman Empire and The Spanish Inquisition along the way. A brief visit with Moses reveals why we only have ten commandments.

‘There’s something very magnetic about Wendy: when she comes out on stage she exudes that difference that a great artist has’. So says choreographer Christopher Wheeldon of the American ballet star who has provided inspiration for many of his works.

Christopher first met Wendy Whelan when the two were dancing with New York City Ballet in the 1990s and when he went on to choreograph Polyphonia, the work he describes as his ‘break-out ballet’, it was Wendy he turned to. ‘She inspired me enormously: she’s really interested in working with artists who are interested in her opinion and finding ways to combine forces to make something beautiful.’

This autumn, after 30 years at New York City Ballet, Whelan will be retiring from the company and is making the leap from ballet to contemporary dance. For her new project, Restless Creature, which is in the Linbury Studio Theatre, she has invited four choreographers of modern dance – Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks and Alejandro Cerrudo – to create pieces for her to perform with each of them.

We spoke to Wheeldon about just what it is that makes working with Wendy – and watching her dance – so special.